Thread by @jbouie

what’s fun about “the 3/5ths compromise was actually antislavery” is that it is an easy way to see if the person actually knows anything about the founding period

https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/1382431644569702403

i actually wrote a little about three-fifths clause last year. the short story is that the pro-slavery/anti-slavery debate ignores the context of the convention nytimes.com/2020/08/07/opi…

the argument over whether the three-fifths compromise was antislavery misses the extent to which enslaved people were going to be “represented” one way or the other and the debate over the extent of that representation wasn’t really about the morality of slavery.

the delegates to the convention largely accepted that slavery was a significant economic interest and that southerners (although not just southerners) wanted protections for it

serious opposition to the three-fifths clause only gains steam once it becomes clear with jefferson’s election in 1800 that the provision puts a thumb on the scale for the south

really important not to read 1830s/40s-style abolitionism into the founding era, as well as to remember that slavery was a different institution than what it would become in the 30 years or so after ratification

also if you want to make the case the Constitution as written in 1787 was antislavery there are much better provisions to highlight

i had a thread about this a while back

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1207369472413184001

one last point: a lot of stuff about the constitution becomes a lot more legible when you remember that many/most of the delegates were either involved in writing the Articles or served in the Confederation Congress and were informed by those experiences!